Søren Kierkegaard

Lived

1813–1855

Era

Modern

Where

Copenhagen

Tradition

Lutheran

Attacking Christendom in the name of Christianity

A Danish writer of private means who published a torrent of books under invented names, each arguing a position he wanted examined rather than asserted, and who spent his last year attacking the Danish state church in a newspaper until he collapsed in the street.

Why it matters

His target was a country where everyone was a Christian by birth and the word had therefore stopped meaning anything — faith reduced to a respectable social fact rather than a decision that costs. He insisted on the individual before God and on faith as a leap that reason cannot underwrite. Largely ignored in his lifetime outside Denmark, he became a founding influence on existentialism and, through Barth and Bonhoeffer, on twentieth-century theology.

All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.